Timberborn is a “futuristic” beaver colony simulation game on a 3D map with fluid dynamics, making verticality an important aspect of the gameplay. Developed and published by Mechanistry, it runs well on Linux with Proton.

Humanity is long gone, but it is not forgotten, as its ruins and waste still scar the land deeply. Now the beavers can claim the land, but only if they can survive the crazy weather and toxic contamination.

Before we start with the gameplay, I have this quirk that if the game offers tools, I always check them first, and Timberborn comes with a map making tool. I had some fun playing with the tool and experimenting with the water physics to understand how it affects the rest of the world.

In this voxel-based world, you can build terrain in variable heights, the smaller unit is a single block, but you can change the “brush” to easily make mountains or canyons. You can also add vegetation to the map that will appear dead at first. Enter the water source.

The water source block will try to flood the area, and find the paths of least resistance. So you can create rivers, waterfalls, seasonal lakes, etc… Also, the blocks close to water will become green, and if you have vegetation there, they will flourish, but if the water floods and covers it, they will die again. The water “leaves” when it touches the side of the map. There is also a source for “badwater”, a toxic sludge that in its purest form will kill things nearby, and can contaminate the fresh water.

After my fun playing around making maps (that you can share in the Steam workshop), it was time to test the game. You have to pick a map, the difficulty (tweakable), and the beaver clan, you start with this nature loving group, but you can unlock a more industrious type - they affect some of the structures available to build.

At the start, you focus on gathering food and construction materials. Beavers are excellent at cutting down trees. They also need water that you can filter from the river. The river provides fertile land nearby for farmlands and timber growth, and you can generate energy from its streams required for more advanced buildings. Then you need to create houses, stockpiles and many more.

Similar to games like The Settlers, you need to build paths, so your beavers can reach their jobs and needs. And on larger maps, you will notice that the path tool will change from green to a red line as you build too far from your city centre, that is when you might have to build another independent colony (at least until you unlock sharing resources between colonies).

Some constructions have a tag “Solid” on them, it means that you can build on top of them, as long as the beavers can reach it (with the help of stairs and platforms). This mechanic pairs well with the map verticality, and will help you build bigger dams, apartment complexes, and also “batteries”. The beavers store energy by hoisting heavy weights, the higher it is built, the more energy it can store.

They will also need places to relax and socialize. They might get hurt, sick, or need to hone their teeth from time to time. You will need to create some buildings to attend those needs around your colony.

Lastly, my favourite: changing the landscape. You start with a simple almost one-block height dam, that will contain water, but also allow it to pass through without flooding the river banks. You can unlock more complex structures to make the most diverse water flow and containment structures. While I find fun sculpting the landscape, it is also important for a couple of reasons.

Expanding your economy, is the first you will face as your colony grows. By creating new fertile lands for farming and timber industry, by increasing the river flow for more energy production, or having more places to collect fresh water.

The game also introduces 2 mechanics later that you can overcome with landscaping.

A cycle of drought, after a set number of days the water source will stop outputting water, and the water everywhere will eventually flow out of the map or be consumed by local flora. While trees are more resilient, some plants will die after a couple of days without water. You can overcome that by building dams and seasonal lakes close to your farmlands.

Later, there is a chance that instead of a drought, you get an influx of bad water. It is worse, and will kill everything very fast. You will need to create structures to block the contamination, and filter and reroute good water.

I like the build up, from the moment you are warned that those mechanics will happen, as they are terrible for your colony. First, the cheerful background music changes to a dire and ominous tune. Then the plants start drying up, and, if you have an influx of badwater, they will die, making the colony recovery even harder. Making stockpiling of food and water a must, and preventing your beavers to touch contaminated water necessary.

You can tweak how often they happen and how long they last in the difficult settings, for the standard settings, on normal, the worst drought lasts 9 days, while in the hard settings it is 30 days, enough to kill all flora in the map.

It is very important to think a bit before changing the landscape drastically. I created a dam to help my farm to stay productive during droughts, but now the clean water would take longer to reach the river that cuts my district in half. There was a source of bad water downstream, it usually gets washed away by the flow of clean water. After the dam holding back the clean water for a couple of days, the contamination was able to creep close to my base, killing trees and blueberry bushes. But it was not as bad as when I created a dam that flooded my whole base and almost wiped out my colony.

There are no enemies in this sandbox game, and your main objective is to survive the water cycles by taming the environment. A quite unique take on the colony simulation genre.

I had a lot of fun playing the base game. Timberborn also offers integration with Steam Workshop, besides sharing maps, people are also sharing ways to tweak even more the game mechanics. I tried two, one that the description had a video complaining that beavers are faster on water, so the modder made them swim faster (in the base game, the beavers are slow swimmers). The other was supposed to reassign the beavers to houses close to their work, but I am not sure if it is working, needs more testing.

Timberborn is available on Steam as Early Access since 2021, it feels very mature right now. It is nice to see the love (frequent updates) the devs are giving to the game, and what they have planned.

While the game is still in Early Access, it won’t be featured in our Recommended Games List but it’s likely to get there as soon as it reaches 1.0.

Key provided by the devs.